pollution

So claims an article in today’s Sunday Times (you are only going to be able to read this if you have a subscription).

The chart below and the claim are taken from a 120 page report “Demographic change and the environment”.

In the first part of this piece, I discussed how the fractured structure of cap and trade is either non-functional or marginally functional.  In the second part, I pointed out how cap and trade, due to its structure, is largely non-responsive to the ethical power of the climate action movement and concerned political leaders. Here I offer a context within which individual effective policy instruments can fit together.

In the first part of this post, I outlined how the components of cap and trade don’t work together to cut emissions.

2. Cap and Trade’s Perverse Ethics Threaten Climate Policy Effectiveness

In this 3-part post, I will outline how cap and trade’s composite structure contains within it fault lines that help defeat its and the climate action community’s goals.  In this first part, I will sketch out the components of the cap and trade hybrid

Okay, I'll admit: The headline above is a bit of a come-on. I couldn't possibly do justice to the past 10 years' worth of green business activity — at least not in the following 1,500 or so words. But as we view the whatever-it's-called decade in the rearview mirror, it's tempting to assess what's transpired since the good old days of Y2K to see how far we've come — and how far we haven't. So, let's do that.

I've been trying over the past few days to find some Hopenhagen in Copenhagen — that is, to see some positive outcome to the COP15 climate summit just concluded. The two-week event ended with a whimper, not a bang, a not-altogether-surprising conclusion to an overhyped event in which all parties had anticipating the entire world coming together to solve a single, critical issue affecting — well, the entire world.

In part I, I made the general case for cap and trade as an unserious policy framework that inserts extraneous elements into pricing carbon that threaten the whole enterprise. I generated general definitions of seriousness and unseriousness and applied them to cap and trade and its market mechanisms.

In a few days in Copenhagen, world leaders will debate and, we hope, agree upon aggressive targets for humanity’s greatest challenge to date: to avert devastating man-made climate change by transforming our economies’ use of energy and of land while maintaining and improving social welfare for the world’s peoples. We have in the past 250 years proceeded on a course of development which has used fossil energy to replace human and animal muscle power with mechanical energy. 

In the first part of this post I identified 10 features of cap and trade, the favored climate policy of many policy elites at this point in time, that make the policy ineffectual. I outlined how cap and trade was sold to America and the world based on faulty assumptions as well as its superficial political appeal to the then Clinton Administration.